


ode to the henderson ground dove

by ThatWeirdGuyInTheBushes



Category: Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Alexis | Quackity-centric, Angst, Character Study, Everyone Needs A Hug, Gen, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Manipulation, Non-Graphic Violence, Non-Linear Narrative, Past Abuse, President Toby Smith | Tubbo, References to Ancient Greek Religion & Lore, Toby Smith | Tubbo Needs a Hug, because its dream smp, if you will, quangst, trauma bonding quackity and tubbo style
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-23
Updated: 2020-12-23
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:07:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28252131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThatWeirdGuyInTheBushes/pseuds/ThatWeirdGuyInTheBushes
Summary: "The Henderson ground dove, or Henderson Island ground dove, is an extinct species of bird in the family Columbidae. Its relatively small wings suggest that it was flightless."-Alex; on Icarus, flying and, balancing acts.
Relationships: Alexis | Quackity & Darryl Noveschosch, Alexis | Quackity & Jschlatt & Toby Smith | Tubbo, Alexis | Quackity & Toby Smith | Tubbo, everything is platonic - Relationship, you damn cretins
Comments: 17
Kudos: 142





	ode to the henderson ground dove

**Author's Note:**

  * For [WreakingHavok](https://archiveofourown.org/users/WreakingHavok/gifts).



> Mr WreakingHavok, I am gifting this to you because your last work made me write this Quangst (Quackity Angst). Enjoy.

Alex stands on the edge, teetering.

Step to the right and you leave, step to the left and you fight. You are a coward or you are a traitor. But Alex has always been both, hasn’t he?

He’s a coward and a traitor but he’s also been in love with so many things. He fell in love with power, he fell in love with this country, he fell in love with _doing something_ and he fell, so deeply, so head over heels, with the feeling of loving like that.

Stand on the line. Stand on the cliff.

He might have loved Schlatt, too, in the odd and complicated way that only Schlatt could make him feel. Because when Schlatt was proud of you, gods did you _feel it._ It got in your bones when he was proud. Electrified the marrow.

Alex told Tubbo once that it was simultaneously the worst and the greatest thing in the world to hear Schlatt say that he hated you. “Because,” he had said, “you want that approval from him. You want it so fucking bad, even though you know that you’d have to a horrible person to get it. And you realize that you’re never going to get it, but you also realize that if a shitty person hates you, then you really can’t be all that bad.”

Working with Schlatt was such a balancing act. Too much approval and you’ve done something that you will never forgive yourself for, too little and your chest goes hollow.

Kwite would have called him Icarus. Arms crossed over his chest, leaning back in a chair, Kwite would have called him a fucking dumbass and then Kwite would have called him Icarus.

Alex sleeps heavily, after the election. He suffocates the guilt under his pillow. He dreams of Junky, standing in the sunlight, asking if he wants to burn the world down.

The answer is yes, some nights. The answer is no, on others. Sometimes Alex flies perfectly in the middle, and he almost gets out in one piece.

Lately, the other side of the ocean has been an island with no one on it but a pig. Technoblade puts a pickaxe through his teeth.

After he dies at Technoblade’s hands for the second time, Alex goes into his planning room and rips a piece of propaganda off the wall. He tears it to pieces, the built-up scream inside him turning his nails into claws. He blinks and every poster has been torn off the wall.

Fundy is standing in the doorway. “You never stop, do you?”

Alex stands on the edge, choking.

He chokes on the person he could have been. 

“I have an article to write.” Fundy steps out of the way when told, and part of Alex wonders if that’s one of the many crude drawings of his legacy Schlatt has left on everyone he knew. Only the gods know how Schlatt carved his name into Alex’s skin.

At least his memorial can’t be seen. Tubbo didn’t get nearly as lucky.

Alex’s hands shake as he tries to write, so much so that the ink gets smeared across the page. He’s trying to write about Technoblade, about the evil and the withers and the flawed philosophy, but his hands can’t stop shaking and his memorial is making his bones tighten.

He turns over the ruined paper and writes about Schlatt so messily that half the words blend into each other, and hardly a sentence is legible.

He doesn’t even know what he was trying to say. What was this going to be? An essay, a piece of his autobiography, a _song?_ Gods above, he is ridiculous. A court jester, Schlatt once called him, and he was right. But that’s everyone in this stupid fucking teenage cabinet. They’re all living jokes, told for the gods’ amusement, and Alex might be one of the funniest.

He got sunburn and thought himself Icarus.

The night before Schlatt’s funeral, Alex and Tubbo ate dinner together. The steak looked lovely, and neither of them could stomach a bite. They sat in silence for a long time, picking at their food. Finally, Alex stood up and leaned across the table to clink his water glass with Tubbo’s.

“To Schlatt,” he had said, “and the greatest thing he ever did: Die.”

Tubbo laughed at that, dark and electric, like a stormcloud about to strike lightning. Alex laughed too, the weather in his voice just as poor.

Niki calls him and Tubbo victims, but Alex doesn’t think that’s the right word. They were more like witnesses, bystanders who sometimes got in between Schlatt and his quest to destroy himself. And neither of them ended up better for it, but that was just what happened to people who stepped into the crossfire, who got between a man and his doom.

Alex stares at Tubbo from across the table. They’re doing some sort of traumatized tango, dancing a rhythm that only they’ve ever known. The music tastes like bruise ointment.

Alex still remembers when Bad came in for a meeting and Schlatt cocked his gun and taught him Russian Roulette. Alex and Tubbo sat at the table, exchanging tense glances, while Schlatt asked Bad if he believed in the gods.

Schlatt was always like that. He liked his dramatic speeches to have an even more dramatic background, philosophy and plotting as the overlay to violence. He ranted about loyalty and smashed a wine bottle at Alex’s feet, taught Tubbo about justice as a preamble to fireworks.

Bad’s face was steady, at the end of that meeting. Steady and contemplative. Almost curious. Bad and Alex do not have much of anything in common, but they are both very used to playing the fool, to not letting on that they’re smarter than they like to seem.

Tubbo stayed inside the house after the meeting, trying to draw the whiskey out of the carpet, and Alex saw Bad out of Manburg. They got to the border and Bad had turned to the side and looked Alex up and down. “Good luck,” Bad finally said, and then he was gone.

Alex and Tubbo stand together at the funeral, shoulder to shoulder, and if Kwite were here he’d probably call Tubbo Daedalus. Both of them here, with wings made of wax, still trapped in the prison that Minos built them, still haunted by the Minotaurs ghost, about to leap together.

Alex rubs the cold off his arms. He wishes Kwite were here.

He thinks, somewhat out of nowhere, that Tubbo would have liked Junky. They were cut from similar cloth. They were both good kids.

Are. They _are_ both good kids.

The funeral clears out and it’s just Alex and Tubbo, standing shoulder to shoulder. Tubbo sighs and it’s heavy. For a tiny moment, Alex finds no other reason to hate Schlatt than just how exhausted that sigh is.

“I’m glad that’s over with,” Alex says, and Tubbo is quiet. “I’m gonna go.”

“Okay. I- I think I’m gonna stay here for a while.” Alex can’t wait to get this horrible fucking suit off.

“Okay,” he echoes.

There’s no funeral for Wilbur Soot, which is weird but doesn’t bother Alex all that much. He needed Schlatt’s funeral for closure. Wilbur Soot has always been a gaping wound of a person, and there was never going to be any proper closure in there.

Weirdly though, things didn’t feel any different after the funeral. But that’s just life, Alex thinks. No one ever _really_ gets what they want.

He finally gets around to writing that propaganda piece on Technoblade, and he still feels like shit afterwards. His teeth hurt. It might be something funny, or maybe even poetic, that he and Tubbo both lost two of their lives in the same rooms. People aren’t supposed to lose two of their lives before they can legally drink, but Alex figures that it’s always nice to get something meaningful out of the bad shit.

He’d like to know where Kwite fits into the Icarus metaphors.

He’d also like to know, as someone who used to be able to fly, why his wings would melt when it only gets colder the higher up you go. Maybe he’s not supposed to think that deep into it. Maybe things have changed since Alex last flew- since Technoblade took a sword to his wings.

Maybe it’s the kind of thing where he’s not really Icarus at all. Maybe Tommy is Icarus. Maybe Alex is just assigning himself importance without any reason to, and Kwite wouldn’t have made the comparison in the first place.

Ranboo sleeps in the white house, sometimes, mostly whenever anyone who works there needs overnight company, and he tells Alex that he’s important. “I think you’re doing your best,” Ranboo says, which is just telling Alex that he’s important in slightly different words.

“I’m sorry that you got here when things were so messed up,” Alex tells Ranboo at three in the morning before he can stop himself. “They used to be good. Really. Trust me.”

“I don’t think it’s that bad now.”

“You don’t have to lie, Ranboo. I know that things are shit right now.” Alex stares out the window and thinks about power and justice and hugging his friends and hating his friends and kicking his friends out of his country and he puts his head in his hands. “But they used to be a lot better, and I think they can be like that again.”

Alex really wishes Sapnap were here. Sapnap gives the best hugs.

The fabric of Ranboo’s suit audibly crinkles as he straightens. “I hope that I can see it someday.”

Melting wax leaves burnt skin behind. Alex hopes, at the very least, that the water is going to be warm.

**Author's Note:**

> comment to give my dog a good pat


End file.
